Christopher DeMuth Religion and the American Future (2008)

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criticize other aspects of the painting: Ne supra crepidam sutor judicaret, which
is Latin for (near enough) always distinguish.
202 NOTES TO PAGES 180 185
Notes
1. I draw in this section on some previous writings, in particular Schiller s
Education, in my book Lives of the Mind: The Use and Abuse of Intelligence from
Hegel to Wodehouse (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 2002), 101 18.
2. Jacques Maritain, Art and Scholasticism and the Frontiers of Poetry, trans.
Joseph Evans (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1974), 24.
3. Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgement, trans. J. H. Bernard (New York:
Hafner, 1972), 5.
4. Ibid., 9.
5. Ibid.,19. Bernard translates this as We ask for the agreement of everyone
else. But Kant writes, more suggestively, Man wirbt um jedes anderen Beistim-
mung. The element of rhetorical suasion is key: taste is a suitor of acquiescence,
of agreement.
6. Ibid., 59, 42.
7. George Orwell, Benefit of Clergy: Some Notes on Salvador Dal�, in The Col-
lected Essays, Journalism and Letters of George Orwell, vol. 3, As I Please 1943 1945
(New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1968), 160.
8. Quoted in Jonathan Yardley, Worrisome Picture: Cincinnati Case Shows How
Expert Handling Can Beat Obscene Art, Washington Post, October 17, 1990, 31.
9. More precisely, it has to do with the confusion of art with a debased idea of free
speech that supposes any limits on expression are inimical to freedom. Moral and aes-
thetic objections cannot always be answered simply by appealing to the First Amend-
ment. The issue was strikingly articulated in the 1920s by John Fletcher Moulton, a
British judge, when he observed that there is a widespread tendency to regard the fact
that [one] can do a thing as meaning [one] may do it. There can be no more fatal error
than this. Between can do and may do ought to exist the whole realm which recog-
nizes the sway of duty, fairness, sympathy, taste, and all the other things that make life
beautiful and society possible. One of the most destructive aspects of our culture has
been the evisceration of that middle ground of duty, fairness, sympathy, taste, etc.
everything that Lord Moulton congregated under the memorable category of obedi-
ence to the unenforceable. ( Law and Manners, The Atlantic Monthly, July 1924, 3, 2).
10. See The Trivialization of Outrage in my book Experiments Against Reality:
The Fate of Culture in the Postmodern Age (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 2000), 277 304.
11. Leo Tolstoy, What is Art?, trans. Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky
(New York: Penguin Books, 1995), chap. 15.
12. Quoted in Jacques Barzun, From Dawn to Decadence: 500 Years of Western Cul-
tural Life; From 1500 to the Present (New York: HarperCollins, 2000), 791.
13. Quoted in Damien Hirst and Gordon Burn, On the Way to Work, in Craig
Brown, The Tony Years (London: Ebury Press, 2006), 228
14. BBC News, October 19, 2001, http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/entertainment/
1608322.stm.
NOTES TO PAGES 185 191 203
15. Duchamp in Hans Richter, Dada: Art and Anti-Art (New York: McGraw-Hill,
1965), 207 8.
16. Tolstoy, What is Art? chap. 10.
17. Ibid., chap. 18.
18. Ibid., chap. 20.
19. Ibid., chap. 14.
20. Ibid.
21. Ibid., chap. 17.
22. Richard Pevear, preface to Tolstoy, What is Art?.
23. Tolstoy, What is Art? chap. 20.
24. Augustine, Confessions 10: 34.
25. Maritain, Art and Scholasticism, 9.
26. Iris Murdoch, The Fire and The Sun: Why Plato Banished the Artists (New York:
Oxford University Press, 1977), 65.
27. Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov, bk. 3, chap. 3.
28. Maritain, Art and Scholasticism, 52, 22.
29. Ibid., 36.
30. The rhetoric as well as the intention of all three would seem to support
Augustine s claim (Confessions 2: 6) that all those who desert you and set them-
selves up against you merely copy you in a perverse way. At the same time,
though, it is worth observing that the analogy works both ways, thus raising the
question of priority. For example, if the artist is figured as a second god, so God is
often figured as a kind of artist or craftsman. One thinks, for example, of Plato s
Demiurge (demiourgos first of all means simply craftsman ). See also the appendix
God as Maker in E. R. Curtius s European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1973), 544 46. Curtius writes: To eluci-
date the topos Deus artifex completely we must go behind it to the myths of the
ancient world. There in both East and West, we find numerous concurring
accounts according to which the creation of the world and man goes back to the
handiwork of God a god who appears now as weaver, now as needleworker, now
as potter, and now as smith, (545).
31. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologicae, 1, art. 14, ad. 8.
32. Ibid., 1, art. 45, ads. 1, 5. See also M. H. Abrams s discussion in The Mirror and
the Lamp: Romantic Theory and the Classical Tradition (New York: Oxford University
Press, 1981), especially 273ff.
33. Plato, Republic, 596.
34. Plato, Sophist, 234c. Compare Symposium, 203d, where eros is described as
being an adept in sorcery, enchantment, and seduction.
35. For this and the following quotations from Alberti, see On Painting, trans.
John Spencer (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1976), 63 7.
36. Alphonso Procacinni, Alberti and the Framing of Perspective Journal of
Aesthetics and Art Criticism (Fall 1981): 36. I am indebted for this discussion of the
204 NOTES TO PAGES 191 193
importance of perspective to Karsten Harries s Infinity and Perspective (Cambridge,
MA: MIT Press, 2001), especially 64 77.
37. Hans Blumenberg, The Legitimacy of the Modern Age, trans. Robert M. Wal-
lace (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1983), 109.
38. Procacinni, Alberti and the Framing of Perspective, 31. For a careful his-
torical overview of the development of perspective in the Italian Renaissance, see
John White, The Birth and Rebirth of Pictorial Space (London: Faber & Faber, 1972).
39. Thus Anthony Blunt, in Artistic Theory in Italy: 1450 1600 (New York:
Oxford University Press, 1978), refers to the weapons of perspective and anatomy
that Renaissance naturalism enlisted in its conquest of the visible world (1, my
emphasis).
40. Erwin Panofsky, Perspective as Symbolic Form (photocopy, Columbia Uni-
versity Libraries, New York, 194?), 15. This achievement in perspective, Panofsky
writes, is only a concrete expression of what had been put forward at the same time
on the part of epistemology and natural philosophy. In the same years during which
the space of Giotto and Duccio . . . was overthrown by the gradual formation of cen-
tral perspective . . . abstract thought definitely and publicly completed the break . . .
with Aristotle s view of the world by giving up the idea of a cosmos built around the
midpoint of the earth as around an absolute center and closed by the outermost
sphere of the heavens as by an absolute limit and by developing the notion of an
infinity not only prefigured in God but also actually realized in empirical reality
(14 15). Panofsky made cognate observations elsewhere, e.g., in Albrecht D�rer
and Classical Antiquity, reprinted in Meaning in the Visual Arts (New York: Double- [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

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